Beautiful Cynicism III

Protester: Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama has expressly supported this policy, why are you supporting it?

So much misinformation has been spewed about the Democrats’ health care reform bill that many Americans now seem to think the government is quite literally out to get them – as in, agents will sneak into your house at night and indoctrinate your children and kill grandpa in his sleep before stealing all your money from under the mattresses. Which is why the town hall meetings being held across the US have become quite frightening: many people literally believe they’re fighting for their lives. Machine guns brought to an ‘open dialogue’ with the president? Death panels choosing whose grandparents to murder? Government-financed health care equated to Nazism? Photographs of Obama doctored to look like Hitler? The worst part is, this is not a mere fringe element occupying the far ends of the political spectrum: this attitude is actually becoming mainstream.

While so many bright minds have come from the United States, nowadays I fear that entire country’s gone batshit insane. And I live right next door.

WTF? Required by law to lose one’s own identity? Whilst this may be expected of the right-wing radicals and wingnuts out on the extreme end of the political spectrum, what surprises me – nay, utterly shocks me – is that half of the survey’s respondents had this attitude. Even more shocking is the reasoning behind this opinion; when asked why women should be expected to change their names, an oft-cited response was (and this is a direct quotation) that “women should lose their own identity when they marry and become a part of the man and his family.”

Double WTF… That this attitude is apparently still so pervasive in mainstream America depresses me more than I can express. And should serve as a wake-up call for those who bleat that sexism no longer exists, that full equality is a reality, and that the glass ceiling was broken long ago. As this study illustrates, a whole lot of people still believe that women should be not only willing but be forced by law to give up their own identities when they marry, subjugating their selves to their husbands. The woman as chattel, a mere blank slate over which the man has free hand. Sigh.

And just in case you think this is an isolated incident, not indicative of a trend, Feministing reminds us of a 2004 case where a Pennsylvania court rejected a petition from a woman who wanted her daughter to have a hyphenated last name; the court found it was in the girl’s “best interests” to have only her father’s name. As well as a case a few years ago in Washington, DC, where a couple was denied a birth certificate for their baby because they had elected to give the baby the mother’s name instead of the father’s.

An employee at the Gem Stop Chevron in La Grande got the surprise of her life when she opened up the automatic teller machine and found a mouse inside a nest lined with $20 bills. The ATM continued to work just fine, despite the mouse discovered on Thursday.
The mouse had chewed up two bills and damaged another 14 to make his nest, but the bank replaced all the money that wasn’t extensively damaged.
The mouse also got a reprieve: He was evicted from his nest but set free outside.
The store’s employees are still mystified about how the mouse got inside the ATM.

Apparently this little creature has expensive taste. Or simply instinctively knew the true worth of those US treasury bills during this economic crisis…